| | |
|
RobinsonAndBrown 4 - 04 Mar 2012 - Main.MichelleLuo
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="DecidingInThePresent" |
|---|
Robinson & Brown | | | I do not think Robinson goes as far as Brown, however, in refusing to ‘give a damn about the rules’. This is where their paths diverge. Robinson still recognizes that other people ascribe to, depend on and orient their behavior in a way that conforms to institutional rules. This makes knowledge of the rules valuable to Robinson, as they serve to indicate the actions that others may take and the institutional confines operating on individual behaviors. While Robinson may not always follow the rules himself, he still plays the game, because abandoning them completely would inhibit his ability to use them as leverage in manipulating others and working the wheels of the system. Brown has adapted his cynicism to become a cynic in every sense of the word. He not only refuses to conform to the rules himself, but advocates direct action against them. I think Lissette is on to something in highlighting how these different approaches are instructional and can serve to guide us in our personal decisions regarding how we choose to interact with the legal system. As Lissette rightly points out, it is awfully easy to criticize the legal profession from a cushy leather chair on the 50th floor of a downtown firm office (or, for that matter, from a significantly less cushy desk chair in JG). Brown is a cynic, because, as Eben said, he can’t find a way not to see the elephant when it is in the room at the dinner party, while Wiley, merely making the occasional cynical observation from the comfort of his armchair, can. While the Wiley, Robinson, and Brown approaches are not necessarily so discrete, it may still be useful to look to each individual to draw out the components of engagement and personality (if any) that inspire us and to adapt those approaches for our own purposes.
-- MeaganBurrows - 03 Mar 2012 | |
>
> | I really like Meagan’s description of Wiley – I think she’s spot-on that Wiley is not unaware of the destructiveness of his life. The only way he can deal with the negative feelings is by sequencing the drugs carefully, hating on other lawyers (Boola-Boola), and concentrating on the idea of chaos and complexity. Wiley splits because he's aware that he's not living. He's not John Brown, because, as Thoreau expressed, Brown is a rare case of a person who actually lived.
One distinction between Brown/Robinson and Wiley/most of us is courage. Maybe Brown inherently had that courage or maybe he trained himself to have courage. I suspect that at least part of it came from the fact that Brown knew the cost of a human life because he had lost a few. Thus, he understood that "it costs us nothing to be just" because the cost of not being just is human life, which is incomparable to the material costs that his critics based their decisions on.
"How do we feel about ourselves after encountering John Brown?"
The answer to this question is clear from the fact that our class discussion devolved into discussions of: 1) whether John Brown was a terrorist or a murderer and 2) how he might have been prematurely anti-justice (Why didn't he wait until the Civil War became surely inevitable? Why didn't he wait for permission? Why didn't he wait to find out if it's okay to go up against injustice?).
The ironic thing is that our reaction mirrored exactly what Thoreau observed about John Brown's critics: “They cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are…Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves.” Most of us can't either - which is why we compare him to terrorists and murderers, in the same way that Brown's contemporary critics called him insane. It doesn't take courage to get into law school and many of us will never train ourselves to be courageous. It's not that we're too far away from the thang, as Lisette wrote, but that we don't see the thang even when it's all around us. We hear stories about injustice but we don't remember them. We feel bad for a few minutes after reading a sad news article about some injustice that doesn't directly affect us, and like the Christians, we turn our computers off at the end of the day and go to sleep quietly. When we measure ourselves against John Brown, we get cognitive dissonance and we deal with it the same way that Brown's contemporaries did: 1) classify him in a way that makes him different from us, and 2) don't think about it for too long.
"How we feel about the apprehension of the trauma – knowing that we’re running toward a moment of working in exhaustion at 2am and knowing we're on the wrong side?"
I went to a firm event the evening after our first John Brown discussion and went away feeling somewhat depressed. All day, I had been troubled by the thought that I probably don't have the balls to do anything about 20 million people being enslaved, and at the firm event, I realized that I'm not going to grow balls by working for a firm. I brought this up at a table of law school students the next day. One friend got really angry and went on a rant about how we should be grateful for being at Columbia (Don't we know how many people would kill for this opportunity?), and how he's disgusted by people who complain about the work. Another said, "What else would we be doing instead?" and everyone else agreed. A third mentioned the money. The final comment was, “I’ll go work for a big firm and support you while you go save the world."
-- MichelleLuo - 04 Mar 2012 | | | \ No newline at end of file |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |